mr. chairman , this is truly a bipartisan bill , the defense part of it in particular .  chairman young and i have worked very closely together .  he visited some places ; i visited three bases .  we found shortages .  we found problems .  we tried to rectify those problems .  we tried to put in what the people in the field asked us and what needed to be done .  we realized that insurance payments needed to be changed .  we realized that the death benefits needed to be changed .  we also realized there is a jurisdictional problem , but we felt like it could not wait .  i have had 12 people killed in my district , and there is no question in my mind for the need for that to be changed .  but the thing that is the most important in my estimation is accountability .  chairman young and i sat in his office not long ago and talked about the bill , and he got his copy of the constitution out and it talked about accountability .  it talked about congressional accountability .  and i thought how unaccountable the defense department seems to be at this stage .  they do not seem to realize we are not here to hurt them , we are here to help them .  we believe that if you do not have the confidence of the people , if you do not have confidence in the way the money is being spent , you are going to lose confidence in the overall project , the overall philosophy , the overall direction we are trying to go .  we put language in the bill last year , and we said , you have got to give us a report .  that report is 3 or 4 months late .  no reason for that to happen .  they had plenty of notice .  and it should have been on our desk before this bill was up so that if there was something that needed to be rectified , we could rectify it .  there are two reports .  i do not know if the second one is late yet or not .  of course that takes us to the next step and that is the thing with the intelligence which we have read in the newspaper and which i can neither confirm nor not confirm has happened .  but i worry that things are getting out of control that we do not know about .  we sit and try to help them every way we can .  many of the things we put in this bill they did not ask for because they did not know about it .  we found out about it , and we made sure that was part of the presentation , part of this bill .  i have to say that when i meet with the secretary of defense , when we listen to his presentation , we always say to him , chairman of the full committee , chairman lewis , chairman of the defense subcommittee the last time , chairman young , we always say , look , we 're here to help you .  give us these reports .  tell us how you 're spending this money .  when i saw there was a $ 9 billion fund that was not accounted for according to the auditors , and , of course , this is not appropriated money , this is money provided for the oil , but still we should know where it goes because it can replace some of the money that we are appropriating for these resources .  